


The Only Day

by Philosopher_King



Series: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold [6]
Category: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Genre: A Stitch in Time - Andrew Robinson, But it's not central, Enabran Tain's A+ Parenting, Episode: s05e14 In Purgatory's Shadow, Established Relationship, Internment Camp 371 (Star Trek), Introspection, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Minor Character Death, Poetry, canon scene embellishment
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:54:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29165286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: Julian listens to Garak's final conversation with Enabran Tain.
Relationships: Elim Garak & Enabran Tain, Julian Bashir/Elim Garak
Series: The Spy Who Came In from the Cold [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2163039
Comments: 19
Kudos: 66





	The Only Day

**Author's Note:**

> Loose sequel-ish thing to [Had we but world enough, and time](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28898454), but you don't need to have read that.
> 
> All dialogue is from "In Purgatory's Shadow," written by Robert Hewitt Wolfe. (I got the script from this very handy [website](http://chakoteya.net/DS9/episodes.htm).)

“Everything’s gone dark. I can’t see you. Are you alone?”

“Yes. There’s no one else but you and me.”

Julian would think about that later—what it meant that Garak wanted him to stay, had lied to his old mentor and superior, the man to whom he said he owed everything. Garak’s lies often hid a seed of truth; what was the truth concealed here? That Garak saw Julian as an extension of himself? As a lover, a partner, his ‘other half’? Or as a student and protégé, as he had been Tain’s; his creature, bearing the imprint of his hand; a new shoot growing from the root of the old tree?

Julian listened with distant horror as Garak told Tain about the enemies he had “already taken care of.” Had Garak killed them himself, he wondered? All of them? How had they died? A disruptor blast fired by Garak’s own hand, like Gul Toran and Corbin Entek? Or was it a discreet poison, or a convenient ‘shuttle accident’?

“Elim, promise me one thing… Don’t die here. Escape. Live.”

“Let me guess: so I can make the Dominion pay for what they’ve done to you.”

“You wouldn’t deny an old man his revenge, would you?”

“I’ll do as you ask on one condition: that you don’t ask me this favor as a mentor, or a superior officer, but as a father asking his son.”

It should have come as a shock, but instead Julian’s first thought was _Of course._ _“They called us the sons of Tain.”_ There was often a truth nestled within the lie; the best lies grow from a seed of truth. Of course Garak felt he had to go save him. It was his duty not only to his mentor, but to his father. Family was everything for Cardassians… and yet Enabran Tain would not acknowledge his own son. Two years ago he had sent an assassin after him, and now…

“I should have killed your mother before you were born. You have always been a weakness I can’t afford.”

His words made Julian’s stomach turn. Were they the closest Garak’s father had ever come to saying that he loved him?

Was this why Garak had let Julian stay—to understand where he came from, how he had become the man he was? Three years ago, when he was dying, he had asked for Julian’s forgiveness, while providing him only the barest means of understanding. Now he was laying himself bare to Julian’s understanding: the monstrous things he had done, and the monstrous hand that had shaped him. Would he ask again for forgiveness?, Julian wondered. Was he asking wordlessly even now? _“To understand all is to forgive all,”_ went the saying. Yet Julian had understood why he’d tried to destroy the Changelings without being able to forgive it.

Had he really understood, without knowing who Tain was to Garak? _“He doesn’t deserve a quick death; I want him to live a long, miserable life”_ , Julian had heard him say, and now, _“I should have killed your mother before you were born.”_ What should Julian say to that? “Of course you murdered God knows how many people and attempted genocide; your daddy never loved you”? Julian’s father—Jules’s father; Julian’s commissioner—had never loved him either. _And I’m lucky all he ever wanted me to do was become a doctor._

“Elim, remember that day in the country? You must have been almost five.”

“How can I forget it? It was the only day.”

No doubt he meant _“It was the only day we spent in the country,”_ or perhaps _“It was the only day you spent as my father.”_ But Julian heard it differently—probably because it was just a few months ago that he had introduced Garak to the work of the English metaphysical poets of Earth’s sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Garak had grudgingly admitted that he liked them, too—the Christian themes were completely alien to him, of course, but it was very Cardassian to ornament philosophical explorations and religious doctrines in the language of poetry. (Still, he had complained that it was terribly gauche of them to _agree_ on anything and they mustn’t make a habit of it.)

So instead of the ordinary things that Garak had probably meant, Julian heard in his words— _“It was the only day”_ —the final stanza of George Herbert’s poem for Easter, the day celebrating the resurrection of his god:

_“Can there be any day but this,  
Though many suns to shine endeavor?  
We count three hundred, but we miss:  
There is but one, and that one ever.”_

Garak had given Julian some strange, tantalizing hints about how Cardassian memory worked—though as with anything Garak said, Julian could never be sure how much of it was true. Every moment of their lives was always present, he’d said. They did not have to dig up and partially refabricate buried fragments of memory the way humans did. Even Julian, with his eidetic memory, did not remember everything all the time; perfectly preserved memories were called up from the recesses of his mind either by his own will, or by some involuntary association. Cardassians’ memories were always present, Garak said, but they could attend to them or not, as the moment required. They could live every moment at once, if they chose, almost like the wormhole aliens, the Prophets… save that they could only live the moments in their past—they were still linear to that extent—and if they spent too long fully submerged in that sea of memory, they would drown.

But a single memory—that could be present at all times, existing in a kind of split-screen with the present and whatever other pasts were needed. Garak could live that day forever without being lost in it like Miss Havisham in her crumbling wedding dress, like Blanche DuBois in her tattered evening gowns. He could live fully in the present, into the future, and just as fully on that one day, stretching it out endlessly, year after year. It could sustain him, taunt him, give him hope and torture him with it. He could use it the way he’d used the implant, to provide an illusory joy that could only make the cold, hard truth of the _now_ that much more unbearable—only this implant wasn’t a time bomb, waiting to bring death suddenly once it had been used for too long. Instead it _was_ the death that he carried with him for as long as he lived, making every day thereafter seem pale, hollow, unreal. _“There is but one…” “It was the only day.”_

“I remember limping home. You held my hand.”

“I was very proud of you that day.”

**Author's Note:**

> The stuff about how Cardassian memory works is from Andrew Robinson's book _A Stitch in Time_.
> 
> I only know about George Herbert because the choir I was in as a college freshman sang Ralph Vaughan Williams' "Five Mystical Songs," which were settings of his poems. Many of the pieces I've sung in choirs over the years have fallen out of my head, but "I Got Me Flowers" stuck with me. [Here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zs6m6uEZZfI) is a lovely recording; I really do recommend listening. (I'm such a sucker for Vaughan Williams.)


End file.
